the summer i turned 30
nostalgic for a life i never lived (introspective vibes!!)
This Substack is not a memoir about the summer I turned 30. I turned 30 in the fall of 2020, and I drank canned wine in an empty parking lot behind the Brooklyn Museum. It was, pandemic aside, a very nice birthday.
I am now a few years into my 30’s, not that it really matters, and my favorite genre of tv show is “teens solving murder and/or falling in love.” So, that’s what this newsletter will focus on. I will watch the tv shows, listen to the music, and observe the trends, and then I’ll write about them, and how they inform my life as an adult woman. It won’t be hard, because this is already a genre I’m deeply familiar with.
The titular piece of content, The Summer I Turned Pretty, is a phenomena of a television show based on trilogy by Queen of Adaptable YA Fiction, Jenny Han. The show centers around a love triangle between “Belly” (short for Isabel, because she is not like the other girls named Bella and Izzy, etc. ) Conklin, and two “hot in different ways” brothers: Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. We all know you can’t write young adult fiction without a love triangle. Even in the most dystopian of worlds, we still have to wonder if Katniss Everdeen (starving, injured, weight of all of Panem on her shoulders, watched her closest friends and family die, etc. etc.) likes kissing the blonde boy or the brunette boy most. And if you’re not team Peeta, you can see yourself out. We do not support Gale in this house!
I’m fascinated by The Summer I Turned Pretty. Each episode feels like a string of short, melodromatic, music videos. Belly leaves a party devastated, turns the key in the ignition, and “Driver’s Lisence” by Olivia Rodrigo plays as she tearfully drives home. Belly and Conrad frolic on the beach while “Invisible String” by Taylor Swift twinkles in the background. The show, by the way, has some sort of relationship with Swift in that they are often the first to debut the “Taylor’s Version” of her re-recorded tracks. Last season she debuted “Delicate (Taylor’s Version)” while Belly and Jeremiah swam around in a pool together. IMHO, he is the wrong brother for her. Not because he’s not a nice boy, but because she is in love with his brother. It’s not a GOOD choice for a rebound. But, I digress. I don’t know if it is the emotionally manipulative music, the Massachusetts beach house setting, or Lola Tung’s genuine and nuanced performance in the show, but I have cried at... more than one episode.
The show fills me with nostalgia for summers that I never experienced. Like Belly, I spent my summers in Massachusetts. I was an anxious kid at a Reform Jewish summer camp in the Berkshires, harboring crushes on boys that were surely more interested in the girls who knew how to do eyeliner and scrunch their hair better than I did. During the school year I went to an all girls Quaker day school, so my dating pool did not expand during the months of September - June. Instead, I’d spend my whole school year simply dreaming that the next summer I would finally talk to my crush and we’d kiss under the tree (there was a specific tree for kissing at this camp, not that I need to explain things like this because, like, obviously there was a kissing tree.) Reader, I hate to burst your bubble, but, it never happened. My very last summer at camp, it almost happened, but I chickened out. After the summer was over, it was revealed to me over AIM Instant Messenger that my crush would have been into it, if only I had made it clear. Are you fucking kidding me?!!! I had wasted my summer by being such an anxious weirdo when I could have been tree-smooching every night in my rolled up Soffe shorts!
I felt like Pam at the end of The Office, admitting that she wanted to scream at herself while watching the documentary back. And I wish I could say that was my lesson and I lived every summer to the fullest and made confident decisions from that day on, but I definitely didn’t.
When I turned to Tiktok, I found plenty of other women over the age of 25 who also resonate with the show. I wonder if they have some of the same feelings I do. I wonder if they feel nostalgia for summers of their youth, or if they wish they could yell at their teen self, like I do.
Like, I could’ve been Belly if I didn’t hate myself in a bathing suit so much at that age that I would barely let a boy see me in one, or was too anxious to go to a party, or wouldn’t tell my crush I wanted to tree kiss, or whatever! I regret hating myself so much at 15 I could never have a Belly summer. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself “You will never feel this strongly again. Use it to make memories, instead of using it to torture yourself!” I will never understand how people say they live with no regrets. I regret what I chose for breakfast this morning!
Am I overthinking this? Yes! But, I overthink everything, so this isn’t out of the ordinary.
Also it’s just a cute show and I love Taylor Swift, so there’s that.
TTYL see you next summer xo